Individuals facing serious life-threatening illness and approaching death deserve to be treated with dignity, respect, and compassion, and to receive care that is focused on the individual's goals for care. Families need and deserve to receive support. To achieve their goals, individuals need to plan with their loved ones and health care professionals. The CompassionAndSupport.org web site aims to educate and empower patients, families, health care, and other professionals to accomplish this goal.

Lifetime Care has been providing hospice care in Monroe, Wayne, and Seneca Counties since the first New York State demonstration projects in 1981. Its hospice and palliative care teams serve patients and families wherever the need for end-of-life care happens to be: in private homes, skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, comfort care care homes, and in its inpatient unit -- the Hildebrandt Hospice Care Center. Lifetime Care's bereavement program is open to the whole community (and free of charge), not just to the families that used its services.

Compassion & Choices is the nation’s oldest, largest and most active nonprofit organization committed to improving care and expanding options for the end of life.

Compassion & Choices improves care and expands options for the end of life. We support, educate and advocate. Across the nation, we work to ensure healthcare providers honor and enable patients’ decisions about their care. To make this vision a reality, Compassion & Choices works nationwide in state legislatures, Congress, courts, medical settings and communities to:

empower people with information and tools, including our free consultation program, to receive healthcare that is consistent with their values and priorities as they approach the end of life.

advance policies that allow people to make fully informed decisions about their healthcare, such as improving hospice and palliative care and ending unwanted medical treatment.

authorize and implement medical aid in dying to allow mentally capable adults in their final weeks or months of a terminal disease to advance the time of death and end unbearable suffering.

It’s our belief — and our experience for the past 30 years — that the path to change starts with the individual, which is why patient-centered care stands at the core of all we do.

Additional Reading

* The book titles are links to amazon if you are interested in previewing or purchasing the book. Most are also available from the Monroe County Public Library.